From Extortion to E-commerce: How Ransomware Groups Turn Breaches into Bidding Wars

Ransomware has evolved from simple digital extortion into a structured, profit-driven criminal enterprise. Over time, it has led to the development of a complex ecosystem where stolen data is not only leveraged for ransom, but also sold to the highest bidder. This trend first gained traction in...

Lucid PhaaS Hits 169 Targets in 88 Countries Using iMessage and RCS Smishing

A new sophisticated phishing-as-a-service PhaaS platform called Lucid has targeted 169 entities in 88 countries using smishing messages propagated via Apple iMessage and Rich Communication Services RCS for Android. Lucid's unique selling point lies in its weaponizing of legitimate communication...

Vietnamese Cybercriminals Targeting Facebook Business Accounts with Malvertising

Malicious actors associated with the Vietnamese cybercrime ecosystem are leveraging advertising-as-a-vector on social media platforms such as Meta-owned Facebook to distribute malware. "Threat actors have long used fraudulent ads as a vector to target victims with scams, malvertising, and more,"...

Authorities Fully Behead Hydra Dark Marketplace

German authorities have taken down the Hydra marketplace – a popular destination on the Dark Web for trading in illicit goods and services, including cyberattack tools and stolen data. This week, they were able to commandeer and take offline underpinning infrastructure such as servers, plus insta...

Combing through the fuzz: Using fuzzy hashing and deep learning to counter malware detection evasion techniques

Today’s cybersecurity threats continue to find ways to fly and stay under the radar. Cybercriminals use polymorphic malware because a slight change in the binary code or script could allow the said threats to avoid detection by traditional antivirus software. Threat actors customize their wares...

A Peek Inside the Underground Ransomware Economy

Ransomware is not just a type of malware – it’s also at the center of a sophisticated, flourishing underground economy that has all the conventions of legitimate commerce. It’s a community made up of major malware developers, affiliates and channel partners, and those that provide adjacent...

Ransomware Going for $4K on the Cyber-Underground

In the cybercriminal underground, ransomware samples and builders are going for anywhere between $300 to $4,000, with ransomware-as-a-service rentals costing $120 to $1,900 per year. That’s according to an analysis by Kaspersky of the three main underground forums where ransomware is circulated...

Malware Gangs Partner Up in Double-Punch Security Threat

Cybergangs are joining forces under the guise of affiliate groups and “as-a-service” models, warns Maya Horowitz, the director of threat intelligence research with Check Point Research. She said the trend is driving a new and thriving cybercriminal underground economy. Several malware gangs have...

Do you think web passwords are the weakest link in security? Indeed they are.

Between 500K and 500M sets of credentials have been compromised over the recent years, according to various sources. Just last week, a compromise of an educational service Edmondo has been reported to expose as many as 78M user accounts. At the same time, individual users are exposed to so many...

Exploiting the Twitter Underground for Fun and Profit

The underground economy on Twitter is still flourishing, and it appears to be a buyer’s market for followers right now, with new research showing that the price for 1,000 followers has dropped nearly 50 percent in the last few months. Barracuda Labs has been tracking the volume of fake accounts o...

The Underground Economy: SMS Fraud

The underground malware economy has expanded and diversified in recent years and the latest frontier is the mobile platform. In this video, Kaspersky Lab’s Denis Maslennikov talks about the ways that attackers use premium-rate SMS messages and banking fraud to bilk users...

Hackito Ergo Sum 2011 slides available for Download !

Hackito Ergo Sum 2011 slides available for Download ! HES aims at anticipating the challenges of the security world and gathers together underground or amateur security researchers together with professional security expert researchers and technical decision makers. During three days, HES will...

New Analysis Shows Pushdo Botnet Sent Trillions of Spam Emails, Generated Millions in Profits

A new, detailed analysis of the operations of the infamous Cutwail/Pushdo botnet shows that the network, which had been he target of several takedown attempts in the last couple of years, is not only amazingly resilient, but also is incredibly prolific, with one section of the botnet sending more...

Wanted: E-Mail Addresses

Spammers always need fresh lists of e-mail addresses, says Steve Santorelli of Team Cymru. Supplying them is a lucrative underground business in its own right. The easy availability of such lists and the commodity prices they fetch is a sign of how well developed the underground economy really is...

Inside the Pay-Per-Install Malware Economy

Stevens provides considerable details on the methods and tools used by cyber-criminals, the seedboxes and crypters that are used to get around anti-malware detection and the clever black hat SEO Search Engine Optimization techniques used in social engineering attacks. An example of one affiliate...

Malware Economy is Thriving

TORONTO — The legitimate economy may be in rough shape right now, but the same cannot be said for the underground economy. Malware authors and botmasters are thriving, experts say, with some online criminals charging as much as $3,500 for their attack toolkits. But don’t be intimidated by the hig...

Cormac Herley on the Underground Economy, IRC Economics and the Externalities of Cybercrime

Dennis Fisher talks with Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research about the paper he co-authored on the realities of the underground economy, why sales of stolen credit cards resemble a market for lemons and how we can get better data on cybercrime activities. Podcast audio courtesy of sykboy65 Downlo...

BBC botnet buy: What were they thinking?

By Roel Schouwenberg As Dancho Danchev pointed out, the BBC leased itself a botnet zdnet.com. I couldn’t quite believe it when I read it. The BBC, arguably one of the very best TV producers in the world, surely should have known better? There are so many things wrong about this that I hardly know...